Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Long winded and short of breath; past the halfway point and into the mountains of Stephen Dixon's Frog

Big leap forward tonight: passed the point of Frog where I gave up last time, and finished off that chapter entirely. Which means I'm well past the halfway point, which is exciting. Now I've got the 60-page 1-paragraph chapter 19, the 200+ page several-paragraph chapter 20, and then the last chapter, which seems closer than it's ever been, yet still so far beyond the horizon.

If I plan on jumping retroactively into the 50 Book Challenge this year (which I learned about from The Girl Detective--who, incidentally, made me want to finally get around to reading Empire Falls after having seen it on multiple occasions after which I'd always thought, "Huh, yeah"--who I believe learned about the challenge from the Bookslut blog, who in turn I think swiped it from somewhere in LiveJournal-land but my desire to backtrace links ends here) I'm going to have to not read much more Stephen Dixon. And, like, not spend the next two months reading the last 300 pages of this book. Which is okay, since, as breathless as his books are (from the limited judgement I can muster after what I've read of his), damn, they're tiring. And slow. I've got the winner of the Tournament of Books (Cloud Atlas, and gosh I hope I didn't just spoint the tournament for anybody) due to hit my mailbox sometime this week though, which might spoil my plans to dive into some...ah...lighter fare. A'ell. I've little hope to reach 50 this year (even with retroactive reading taken into account) but it might be fun to see just how bad I fail.

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